Event Streaming Platforms

Apache Pulsar is an open-source messaging and streaming platform that splits brokers from storage, keeping segments in Apache BookKeeper so capacity and serving scale independently, with multi-tenancy and geo-replication built in.

Confluent is the commercial data streaming platform built around Apache Kafka by its original creators, sold as self-managed Confluent Platform and as the Confluent Cloud service, and acquired by IBM in March 2026.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is AWS's managed event streaming service, organising data into shards with provisioned or on-demand capacity and integrating directly with the rest of the AWS analytics stack.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub is an asynchronous, scalable messaging service that decouples producers from consumers, offering push and pull subscriptions, configurable exactly-once delivery, and roughly 100-millisecond latency.

Azure Event Hubs is Microsoft's fully managed event streaming platform, natively supporting the Apache Kafka protocol alongside AMQP and HTTPS so existing Kafka workloads run without code changes or cluster management.

NATS is a messaging system distributed as one small Go binary, offering at-most-once core messaging with JetStream adding a persistence layer for at-least-once delivery, replay, and server-side consumer state.

WarpStream is a Kafka-compatible streaming platform with no local disks, writing directly to S3-class object storage, and running its stateless agents inside the customer's own cloud account under a bring-your-own-cloud model.

AutoMQ keeps Apache Kafka's compute layer and replaces its storage with cloud object storage, claiming 100% Kafka API compatibility and substantially lower cost by removing multi-replica local disks and cross-zone transfer.

RabbitMQ is a widely deployed open-source message broker built on Erlang/OTP, combining rich queue-based routing with a Streams feature that adds append-only, replayable logs alongside traditional queues.

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed log for high-throughput, durable event streaming, with a large ecosystem including Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams.

Redpanda is a Kafka API-compatible streaming platform written in C++, shipped as a single binary without ZooKeeper or a JVM, available self-hosted or as a managed cloud.